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Enigma was no mystery to Poles

Matthew Day Warsaw

IT IS hailed as a masterstroke of British code-breaking that helped to defeat Hitler and saved the lives of thousands of Allied soldiers.

However, decades after Nazi Germany's Enigma code was first cracked, Poland has gone on the offensive to reclaim the glory of a cryptological success it feels has been unjustly claimed by Britain.

Frustrated at watching the achievements of the British wartime code-breakers at Bletchley Park lauded, while those of Poles go overlooked, Poland's parliament has launched a campaign to ''restore justice'' to the Polish men and women who first broke the Enigma codes.

As part of the effort, the upper house of Poland's parliament is to pass a resolution praising Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski, the three Polish mathematicians who first broke the codes in the 1930s.

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Hailed as ''heroes'' in the resolution, the three worked at the Polish Cipher Bureau and in late 1932 came up with three methods for reading the encrypted codes produced on the Enigma machine, which the Germans thought were unbreakable.

Historians believe that the Allies' ability to eavesdrop on German coded communications helped to shorten the war in Europe. Much to Polish frustration, the work of British cryptologists at Bletchley Park, including Alan Turing, who would go on to pioneer early computers, has since attracted most of the credit.

''In both popular literature and official information the public was told that the breaking of the Enigma codes was due to the work of the British intelligence services to the complete omission of the work of Polish scientists,'' reads the resolution.

The 2001 film Enigma, in particular, ruffled Polish feathers. The British production starring Kate Winslet and set in Bletchley Park made little mention of the Polish contribution to cracking the codes, and rubbed salt into the wounds by depicting the only Pole in the film as a traitor.

At a meeting outside Warsaw in July 1939, just weeks before the start of World War II, the Poles passed on the secrets of the Enigma codes to British and French intelligence officers and handed over Polish-made replicas of Enigma machines.

The British went on to develop their own core of elite cryptographers based at Bletchley Park, and while the Germans constantly added layers of complexity to their Enigma codes, the principles discovered by the Poles still applied.